This is the "Before" image: Today I wanted to shoot autumn colors. The weather was overcast skies with high winds. The wind gusts presented a problem of getting anything reasonably sharp. By mid-afternoon the sun came out enough to record vibrant colors. With the winds the way they were, I decided to try and capture movement in the leaves. The privacy fence added another element of interest to the image.

Message edited on: 11/06/2005 18:55

Tip of the ole Hat

[]/;^)

This is the "After" image: I treated the approach just like I do when shooting with transparency film, by metering for the highlights. This allowed me an exposure with plenty of meat to work with. This left me with a dark overall image, but my highlight exposure was exactly where I wanted it. Remember, you cant build up what you dont have.

The first correction adjustment I made was to the Highlight/Midtone/Shadow areas, tweaking each level, mainly bringing up the midtone level to lighten the overall exposure, without blowing out the highlights.

The second correction was adjusting Hue/Saturation/Lightness levels where you can adjust individual colors. I increased saturation 25% to the yellow, red, and green colors.

The privacy fence was too dark, so I used the lasso tool to select around it and adjusted appearance using the clarify button.

Next thing was to decrease the image size and sharpen with the unsharp mask suitable for uploading to Renderosity.

Finally I added a black border to bring out the dark branches, which were overpowered by the abundance of color. The font was then selected for the title, changed to a raster layer and saturated 26% to make the color pop out. Then I added the copyright symbol and signature. To make the copyright symbol, press down and hold the ALT key and type 0169 on the right-side keypad. Not all fonts allow the symbol, so experiment!

Message edited on: 11/06/2005 18:54

Tip of the ole Hat

[]/;^)

The result sure is beautiful!!! i love the colors!!! thanks so much for sharing how you did it! :)

This is truly stunning. Thanks for all the info. I can see the transformation and it is worth every step you have taken. Thanks for sharing. Suresh